Interesting formula holds the keys to The Lodge

Australian politicians may appear to be a rabble ruled by self promotion and personal animosity, but it seems all this leadership angst can be reduced to a mathematical formula, just like the universe itself.

The leadership problems plaguing the Gillard government could come down to one simple thing – not enough cabinet reshuffles.

Two political scientists from the University of British Columbia and the University of Iceland studied Australia’s prime ministers and their cabinets, along with counterparts in Canada, Ireland, Britain and New Zealand, to discover whether there is method in the madness of political bloodletting.

They tested whether reshuffles are more likely if the PM is selected informally or by the parliamentary party; as the election draws near; as the governing party’s popularity declines; as the PM’s personal popularity declines; and as dissent within the PM’s party increases.

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“The central assumption of our theoretical model is that PMs are driven by a desire to maintain power," they say in their paper, The Timing of Cabinet Reshuffles in Five Westminster Parliamentary Systems.

“This framework leads us to predict that PMs will reshuffle their cabinets as their intraparty, coalitional, and electoral positions become more precarious."

Sheesh. By this reasoning, the Gillard government should have had its fourth cabinet reshuffle yesterday.

Former PM
Kevin Rudd
oversaw only two significant reshuffles. If the academics’ theory is true, perhaps a third sweeping reshuffle to see off his deputy and most of his front bench would have spared us a rerun of the Return of the Ruddbot Part II. The interesting thing the researchers found PMs tend to shuffle their ministers around not to promote “good" ministers but to cement their power and reduce their ministers’ “moral hazard", which means dodgy behaviour at the risk of the others.

Kam will be in Parliament House on Friday. He will deliver a speech, “Paying politicians: do we get what we pay for?", which will draw on his research and question whether better pay for politicians has delivered a better standard of politician.

Whoever is the resident of The Lodge on Friday should drop in to Kam’s lecture and ask him to explain his recent research, which applies mathematical models to the motivation for reshuffles.

This one in particular looks interesting: uPM(x1,x2)=-||x1||2-||x2||2

Rather sums it all up, don’t you agree? Of course the Holy Grail of politics is a fail-safe formula predicting the outcome of an election.

A celebrated election formula is US political scientist
Allan Lichtman
’s “13 Keys to the White House", which claims to have called every president correctly since
Ronald Reagan’
s re-election in 1984.

The formula tests the performance of the governing party in 13 questions and if five or fewer answers are negative, the incumbent wins. If six or more answers are negative, the challenging party wins.

For the first time, the intellectual and political brains trust of The Australian Financial Review brings you “13 keys to The Lodge" (with apologies to Professor Lichtman).

Question 1: After the mid-term elections, does the incumbent party hold more seats in the House of Representatives than after the previous mid-term elections? Answer: um, dunno, but let’s say no. Labor has been slaughtered in the state elections.

Question 2. Is there no serious contest for the party leadership? Answer: Are you joking?

Question 3: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting PM? Answer: Can I tell you on Friday?